IT has become more usual to question the relevance of the Dáil and its formalised, inflexible and infrequent sittings than is healthy for a modern democracy.

JUST as the majority of humanity once believed that our world was flat, that the colour of your skin or sexual orientation was an indicator of your humanity or character; just as the Catholic church — and far too many other religions — thought it was perfectly acceptable to suppress those who disagreed with them by barbecuing them alive, we have convinced ourselves that elitism is redundant.

HEALTH Service Executive figures released yesterday are a challenge to us all. The HSE tell us that if each of us exercised for about 20 minutes a day we could save the bones of €1,000 in health funding each year.

Thousands of people marched yesterday from the Garden of Remembrance, down O’Connell Street, past the GPO, to Dáil Éireann in solidarity with the survivors of sexual abuse in Catholic residential institutions down through the decades.

NOW that the winners’ euphoria is being tempered by a sense of the size of the challenge ahead; now that Fianna Fáil and the Greens have had a few days to come to terms with the depth of the disenchantment expressed by an angry and betrayed electorate, it might be time to consider what the results mean.

IT is typical of our politicians that a long-awaited and important debate on the Ryan report has been deferred to facilitate a doomed vote of no confidence in the Government.

SO, the medicine has been administered and now all we can do is wait, watch and hope, wondering if thepatient will respond or succumb to the malaise.

IT may have taken over a decade but at last justice of a sort has been done.

THIS morning battered, bruised, rejected, angry and facing a new and reduced reality, Fianna Fáil will feel like so many of those whose lives have been changed completely by that party’s appalling economic mismanagement and magisterial indulgences.

ONE of the few straws of comfort many of us reached for when the obscenities revealed in Judge Seán Ryan’s society-defining report was that the atrocities were firmly rooted in the past.